Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Behind the Video Camera, an Avid Cook

By Jeff Gordinier May 20, 2013 2:01 pmMay 20, 2013 2:01 pm

Photo

Credit Jared Sosa

Ze Frank has been known for years as a master at using videos to share stories and generate laughs on the Web, which is why BuzzFeed recently brought him in as an executive. Among his friends, though, he is known as an avid and ambitious home cook. Mr. Frank, 41, spoke by phone from Los Angeles, where he lives, about starting young in the kitchen and turning to a (mostly) vegan diet after a doctor told him his cholesterol was way too high.

On the food of his youth “My mom became a cook, a chef, and opened up a restaurant in Albany called Cathy’s Waffle Store. We lived upstairs from it. So I grew up in a restaurant environment. My first job was making the tortillas that we used for enchiladas and things like that. It was a food-focused house. The kids had to cook dinner once a week — from when we were really little. My mom was very health-oriented — everything was dark brown rice and vegetables and kind of hippie-ish food — so my memory of it is that when the kids got a chance to cook, we would pull out the French cookbooks and try to do coq au vin or something that we perceived to be a little fancier.”
On his Southern California barbecue phase “When I moved out here, because of the weather, I was able to get one of those really nice big smokers. I was doing a nine-pound brisket and two chickens on the weekends. I love brisket. I think it’s the pinnacle of American cooking, in that we took an inedible piece of meat and made it one of the most incredible foods. Unfortunately, though, it is delicious because of its fat content. The smoker’s just kind of stagnated now.”
On adjusting to a (mostly) vegan diet “The first phase was sort of a giant retraction, where I just went basically into fruits, nuts and raw vegetables. I had no real conception of what veganism was. I immediately bought Real Food Daily’s cookbook, and looking through it, I got the sensation that you get when you look through a real Thai cookbook. There’s, like, 50 ingredients that you’ve never heard of, and they require this preparation that you can’t even imagine. So I didn’t really do very well. I mean, I did well from the perspective of weight loss, because I wasn’t really eating anything of substance.”
On why he’ll leave haute vegan cooking to the chefs “When I started to look into cooking in that vein, you’re getting into xanthan gum and these very complicated cashew-cheese preparations. I kind of drew the line. That just felt like I was building a car out of Legos.”
This interview has been condensed and edited.